Show Trial Offers Hope For Women's Rights In China

In Bid To Impress Un Forum, Beijing Moves Against Spousal Abuse

January 06, 1995|By Uli Schmetzer, Tribune Staff Writer.

BEIJING — China has jailed the first Chinese husband for raping his wife, a sign it is anxious to improve its tainted human rights reputation before it hosts the 4th United Nations' World Women's Conference here in September.

The case of Jing Zhiping in northern Heilongjiang province was exalted in the official media as a warning that men can no longer beat, sell or mistreat their spouses with impunity in a country where independent surveys have alleged that at least one in five married women is subjected to violence by her husband.

Although China's constitution grants equal rights, equal pay and job opportunities to women, the law of equality rarely is applied.

What prevails, according to women activists, is a feudal mentality that views the female as an inferior creature who can be fobbed off with reduced pay, forced into marriage, abused, sold, kidnapped or in rural areas even swapped for animals.

"We see more and more violence against women. These crimes reflect the low status of women in our society, the lack of protection and the unawareness about womens' rights," the official Beijing Youth Daily said recently.

Mao Tse-tung's revolution constantly extolled the equality of women with posters and slogans but failed to eliminate intrinsic discrimination and prejudice.

This week Jing was sentenced to 6 years in prison after he and his three brothers kidnapped his wife Liu during a recess in their divorce trial, the official Chinese media reported.

The brothers took Liu to Jing's home where all three allegedly raped her as punishment for her audacity in demanding a divorce, the press reported.

Such macho situations are not unusual in China. In northwestern Gansu province a court has been hearing the case of Chen Tianshan, whose wife walked out on him during their honeymoon. She argued that their arranged marriage had "no emotional foundation," according to the Wenhui Daily.

The court was told that Chen then collected eight relatives and abducted his wife. The eight men face charges of rape, hooliganism and subjecting the wife to "indignities" for weeks. The woman is now a patient in a psychiatric ward.

The daily reports of women being forced into prostitution, kidnapped and sold to remote peasants, gang-raped and abused by their spouses have become an embarrassment to a government anxious to project itself for the women's conference as a modern socialist nation that respects women's rights.

In what amounted to a spectacular show trial, the Beijing Intermediate Peoples Court on Aug. 9 sentenced eight men to death for killing their wives over what the court described as "trivial domestic disputes."

The unusual openness of the trial and the detailed evidence provided by the prosecution-including one wife being stabbed 100 times while the mother-in-law was choked to death-served as a warning to Chinese husbands that the days of tolerating violence against women may be ending.

"The Chinese government believes that the elimination of all forms of violence against women is highly necessary," said an official paper on China's position on women's rights last year.

To give added clout to its pledge of striving for equality, the leadership promised to appoint a woman vice premier this year after the official All China Women's Federation pointed out that only 12 women are full members of the Communist Party's 189-member Central Committee.

More and more of China's women's groups are aware that the government is unlikely to ban their activities before the prestigious UN conference, and they are discussing the long repressed topic of violence against women.

Last summer the Beijing Women's Research Institute staged a series of plays that graphically depicted violence in the household. In one of them, the husband shouts: "Bring me beer, damn woman, and don't talk back" while he hits his wife.

Workers at the institute said many Chinese wives accept being beaten by their husbands. "They don't realize it's wrong or illegal," an institute official said.

One of the most dramatic accounts illustrating the disdain for women in China was published by the official Chinese Women's Daily, whose reporters followed the story of eight teenage school girls sold by the Guiyang South Professional Technology School in Canton province to the Fuhua Hotel in Shunde City as "virgin hookers."

One of the most startling parts of the story of how the naive young girls were lured into the sex industry was the arrogant manner in which the school director refused to refund the girls' tuition fees once the scam was uncovered.

Confronted by the paper's reporters and the police, the hotel manager even refused to release the girls' luggage unless each girl paid a $20 penalty for having "quit the job."

In the end, all the paper could do was promise its readers: "The case is not finished yet." It was a declaration applicable to women's rights in general in China.